BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; White Kid, In a Black World

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: September 16, 2003

THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE

By Jonathan Lethem

511 pages. Doubleday. $26.

Jonathan Lethem's dazzling but fundamentally flawed new novel, ''The Fortress of Solitude,'' is at once wildly ambitious and quietly intimate. It aspires to the social range and reach of John Updike's Rabbit novels and Michael Chabon's 2000 novel, ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,'' but it also resonates with the personal, confessional tone of ''Catcher in the Rye.'' It borrows contemporary riffs from sources like Eminem's ''8 Mile'' and Nick Hornby's ''High Fidelity,'' but at the same time tries to frame its coming of age story with coy, Coover-esque allegories and high jinks.

This last element is a vestige of the postmodernist techniques this author used in earlier works like ''Girl in Landscape'' and ''Motherless Brooklyn,'' which mixed genre conventions, surreal special effects and playful deconstructions to create clever but somewhat aloof narratives. In this case it yields a series of unconvincing and weirdly forced passages that break the spell that Mr. Lethem has so assiduously created in the remainder of the novel.

It is a testament to his sheer verve as a writer and the acuity of his social and psychological observations that the novel as a whole manages to override these awkward interludes in which the hero and his best friend (as both children and adults) play at being superheroes, using a special ring to invoke magical powers of invisibility.

Happily, the bulk of ''The Fortress of Solitude'' -- which takes its title from Superman's arctic retreat -- avoids such cutesy pyrotechnics to focus on the story of Dylan Ebdus's coming of age. This is a story about fathers and sons, about best friends who grow apart, about the nervous subtext of race as it has played out in American society in the last three decades, and it demonstrates that Mr. Lethem does not need the tricked-up narrative strategies of his earlier books to hold the reader's attention. More important, it attests to a new virtuosity on his part: an ability to conjure disparate worlds from Brooklyn to Berkeley to Hollywood with uncommon energy and skill, as well as an ability to map the bumpy terrain of childhood and adolescence with humor and compassion and seemingly total recall for the enthusiasms and humiliations of those years.

Dylan Ebdus, we learn, grows up in the 1970's on Dean Street in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. His father, Abraham, is an eccentric and reclusive artist who spends most of his time in an upstairs studio working on an experimental film that may never see the light of day; his mother, Rachel, is a manic and possibly mad hippie, who one day abruptly picks up and leaves to traipse around the country with a boyfriend.

His mother, Dylan recalls, made a stupid, beautiful and very American mistake: she cast him in the honorable role of ''a whiteboy integrating public schools.'' But those schools, he adds, ''were just then being abandoned'' and becoming ''rehearsals for prison,'' and the daily reality of Dylan's boyhood was often one of hunched trepidation. One of the few white children in his neighborhood, Dylan was routinely mocked and hassled: he took to carrying his money in his shoes, with some spare ''mugging money'' in a pocket to pay off would-be assailants. Halloween was an annual ordeal to be endured, and school another gantlet to be run.

Throughout Dylan's boyhood his idol and sometime protector was Mingus Rude, the ultracool son of a once famous black musician, who lived down the street. Whether he's playing ball or simply hanging out with the other kids on the block, Mingus radiates a laconic perfection. He turns Dylan on to comic books and the hit-and-run art of graffiti, and the pair soon develop a shared obsession with a mysterious ring acquired from a homeless man who believed he could fly; in the boys' fantasies the ring has the power to transform them into Aeroman, a superhero who helps thwart crime.

Despite the dubious Aeroman passages that pop up throughout this novel, Mr. Lethem does a magical job of conjuring up Dylan's day-to-day life: the multiple worlds that children inhabit -- at home, at school, on the street -- each world segregated from the other, each defined by unalterable codes and freighted with desperately guarded secrets.

There is a stereoscopic vision to the author's portrait of Dylan's Brooklyn: Mr. Lethem captures with perfect pitch the grunginess and fear of the boy's life, the undertow of anxiety that constantly tugs at him; but he also captures the adrenaline rush of the city, its tumult of change and changing expectations, as gangs and gentrification vie for ascendancy on Dean Street, and hip-hop, cocaine and punk music begin to permeate teenagers' lives.

Mr. Lethem, guest editor of ''The Year's Best Music Writing 2002,'' writes about music with enormous authority and ardor, and he uses it to chronicle the lives of Dylan and his friends, and of their parents. In giving us a soundtrack for their lives, he also limns the changing spirit of the nation, as R&B and rock gave way to hip-hop, as the lines between white and black music converged and blurred.

Dylan will grow up to become a music writer, too. But while he sees his love of music as a way to keep in touch with his roots, it provides him with a way to intellectualize his past. Having left Brooklyn to go to college -- first to an artsy New England campus, later to Berkeley -- Dylan is deeply conflicted about who he is and what he has left behind. He maintains a cordial distance from his father and loses touch with Mingus, who has spent many years in and out of prison. Dylan's belated decision to return home will spur him to try to come to terms with the childhood he has tried to escape and the past and people he has left behind.

Although the ending of ''The Fortress of Solitude'' is contrived and melodramatic -- full of annoying Aeroman asides and pretentious efforts to turn the adventures of Dylan and Mingus into a mythic ballad of lost hopes -- the novel's hold on the reader's imagination is strong enough to overpower this conclusion's tinny echoes.

Mr. Lethem has written a novel with many defects, but a novel that nonetheless attests to his potent storytelling talents.